It’s About the Characters
I admit it. Sunday night after “Homeland,” I watched the third episode of “The Affair,” which, in case you’ve been at sea for a month or so out beyond cable, is a soap opera based in Montauk, a place I have called home for nearly a half century.
The next day, I went downtown to Paulie’s Tackle shop, always an interesting place to be, especially during this, the height of the fall striped bass surfcasting season, a shop that the writers of “The Affair” might have thought to visit.
Now, I’m a writer, right? In the end, writers are carpenters. We need tools (a basic understanding of the language), a project (story), a plan (plot), and materials. The materials include characters.
In journalism characters are what they are, and it’s up to the journalist to know them. In fiction, characters are created from whole cloth — to mix metaphors — or, more often, are borrowed from people the writer meets while doing his or her research on the Montauk docks, for instance, or the Lobster Roll, a k a Lunch, on Napeague.
So, I’m at Paulie’s on Monday afternoon. Paul Apostolides is smoking a cigarette, talking on his cellphone to one of the hundreds who call from UpIsland each day to see where the fish are.
“They’re on the town beaches. The bunker have shown up. They’re throwing bottles at ’em. Weighed in a 36-pounder an hour ago. Down by Wave Crest, Gurney’s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See ya,” went the one-sided conversation. Wandering around the shop, looking at lures, peering into a few jars of pork rind strips of various colors, and with ears bent to Paulie’s words was a surfcaster recently arrived in town.
His name was Howie Gaber. He said he’d caught a bunch of big bluefish on Napeague earlier in the day. He talked about the relative advantages of casting at ebbing versus flowing tides, depending on where you’re fishing, of course. He told me about how the bait got trapped shoreward of sandbars on Martha’s Vineyard, where the striped bass waited offshore for the tide to rise.
“I was on the cover of Saltwater Sportsman in 1986. A flyrod bass I caught on Martha’s Vineyard. Used to live there. The picture was taken by Kib Bramhall, the old editor, a great artist. Mr. Martha’s Vineyard. Now, I spend summers in Quebec fishing for Atlantic salmon. Then I come here.”
I needed a plug adapter, so I walked across the road to Becker’s Hardware where Billy Becker was holding forth, and not holding back, on his subject du jour, that being how a number of prominent Montauk businesses had blown it by closing right after Labor Day and missing a month of fine weather and brisk business.
Beer flowed like a yellow river on Friday night when Kyle and I went to Zum Schneider for the restaurant-beer garden’s Octoberfest festivities and watched the lobsterman Little Anthony Sosinski dance to the oompah band like a man possessed, long, blond hair flying.
My point is, if there’s one place in the world with characters, it’s Montauk. “The Affair” features a few fine actors, the cinematography captures much of our beloved home’s beauty, the plot is as old and sturdy as Eve, Cain, and Abel, but where are the characters, the color? The writers must have had blinders on. Where are the likes of Joey Flapjaws, Jimmy Hewitt, Nasty Nessel, Henry Uihlein, Phil Berg, George Watson, Rori Finazzo, Dave Krusa, Bonnie Brady, on and on?
And, let us not forget Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. He called to report that he “almost got hit in the head by a woodcock coming off the ocean of all things. Don’t ask me what he was doing on the ocean. Must be cold up north.”
Speaking of birds, flocks of scoters are on the wing, thousands of them. Bennett reported “big blues” on Napeague in front of the White Sands Motel,